Manan writes the first Guest Post on my blog.  Manan is an engineering student who enjoys blogging. Spends majority of his time on the internet following tech blogs & tweeting. A fan of Microsoft & someone who hates Linux. He blogs at http://beingmanan.com

Many blogs, many feeds. It becomes difficult to filter & follow. So was the idea behind me setting up website dedicated to Microsoft, the idea was simple – an aggregator & self posted content. Searched on the net for plugins for WordPress failing to find anything that would suit me I came across Drupal which had the “module” for feed aggregation. Having heard about Drupal in the past I decided to set it up & the rest is a painful history.

The pinch was felt quick, the admin mode is a maze. It requires a good amount of time to be spent in order to remember what is where. The jargon doesn’t make sense. For example tags, the world knows what they mean & their function but in Drupal they have “taxonomy” that’s used for categorization & tags. Upon realizing what “taxonomy” actually is begins the next challenge, that being of setting it up. Good luck with that. Make sure to do it right ‘coz you will have to push the limits of ease-of-use to edit them.

In between of setting up my site, figuring my way through taxonomy & pulling my hair off, Drupal released an update. Now being a WordPress user I thought there would be an easy way to do it considering this is a CMS where the amount of information can be enormous. But, to my surprise updating Drupal is something that will make you take the risk on not updating it at all! There is no easy way of upgrading Drupal it’s the highway or the highway. Yes, you got that right.

Let’s talk about the community around Drupal. One word, unhelpful. The plugin community of Drupal does not respond to queries, they don’t release updates to plugins. The plugins will be alpha for months with the final release no where in sight. Updating plugins too is again like updating Drupal. Avoid as long as possible.

Let’s talk about adding content. Initially when I saw that Drupal has classifications like Book, Page, Blog etc. I liked it only to realize that when I go into actually writing an article there is no Rich Text Editor! It’s all HTML. How friggin’ stupid is that?! Insult to injury none of the plugins to add RTE work properly. None. Zero. Nil.

The amazing Windows Live Writer also can’t be used post to Drupal. A module that exists only allows you to create blog posts & not any other type of content that Drupa supports.

Lack of a RTE, weird Taxonomy, adding content requires me to go to the site every time & the fact that updating it is a complete PITA Drupal makes for a horrible choice. Simply put the problem with Drupal is that it’s too rigid for pro-web-devs & too un-usable for enthusiasts/casual users.

If you have a grudge against someone or want to see someone suffer hire them to manage your Drupal site. Personally, I’d say please forgive them. They are human too.

Once you get the domain and decided where you going to host, Its time to get your hands dirty with all the softwares you want to install for your website. It could be as simple as WordPress or a combination of softwares like a CMS+Photogallery.

Most of the hosting companies have either Fantastico or their own 1click software packages which makes life super simple for novice users to install bunch of software’s at a click on a button. Incase you don’t have that option with your hosting company and want to install open source software just download it from the respective site, upload it to your server and install (mite not be as easy at times )

A quick low down on all free opensource software available on the net to get kickstarted with your website. [All these softwares will work on a Linux Server]

Content Management System

When you have a lot of content+need for polls+forums+photo galleries all in one you go for a CMS.

Mambo
Drupal
Joomla

Blogs

When you want to express your thoughts as simple posts. But the blogging engines have become very powerful and have lot of features which a CMS has like polls+photo galleries+events+…

WordPress
b2evolution

Photo Galleries

If you need to show case your portfolio or just want to upload your wedding album on your own domain… Yes there are free services like flickr+picassa available where you can upload. But having your own Photo Gallery installed will give you more freedom to customise it what you want.

Gallery
4images
Coppermine

Ad Server

If you have a website which is popular enough for people to come to you to display their banners you would need an Ad server which will take care of serving the Ad + track the number of clicks/views, allow you to schedule the ads and many other things…

OpenX

Forums

Forums are open discussion boards where related topics are categorised. People can engage in discussion by posting messages on relevant topics and replying to messages already posted.

Phpbb
SMF

Digg Clones

They are content management systems in a unique way that encourages users to participate and control the content on the site.

Pligg

Social Network

So you want to start your own orkut or facebook you can do so in a couple of hours using one of the freely available software…

PHP Izabi

Shopping Cart

If you have some goods to sell and need a quick online shopping cart. Most of the shopping cart come with ready to use modules which are plugged in to some of the popular Payment Gateways (Paypal)

Zen Cart
OsCommerce

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions… Simple management tool to maintain FAQ’s for a particular website

FAQMasterFlex

Polls and Surveys

Usefull when you need to conduct surveys/polls.

Advanced Poll
phpESP
PHPSurveyor

Mailing List

If you want to send the same mail to 100000 of people at the same time and on a regular basis, use a mailing list program where you can templatise your mail and have a single repository for emails

PHPlist

Guestbook

No one really uses them any more… I am wondering why i have it here

ViPER

Wiki

A wiki is a type of website that allows the visitors to add, remove, and sometimes edit the available content

PhpWiki
Tiki Wiki

Project Management

Now if you have a team working on a project and you want to keep a tab on whose doing what and how much time its taking go for one of the PM tools… There are some online services also available which do the same task…

PHProjekt
dotProject

Other Scripts

Moodle

• Moodle is a course management system designed to help educators create quality online courses

Noah’s Classifieds

• Run your own Classified ads website!

PHPauction

• Host your own auctions site!

You have Google Analytics, SiteMeter to monitor your traffic. They will tell you how many people visited the website, from where, how much time they spent and so on.

You can use Google Adsense, AdBrite which will provide you with banners which can earn you some revenue.

Each of the software mentioned above have an Admin interface to control the content flowing to the website. Also some of these software’s have tons of plugins most of them are free and can add a lot of value to the host software.

As you can see there is a hell lot one can do using these free Open Source Softwares…

If there is some Open Source Software you are using and think it will be useful to be listed here do comment about it or drop me a line.

Cheers!